When Good Transit Tech Doesn't Talk to Other Systems

Three different transit operators told me some version of the exact same problem recently.

Their dispatch doesn't talk to vehicle maintenance. Maintenance doesn't talk to billing. And the list of back-office silos goes on. Each piece works fine on its own, but getting them to work together, on a tight budget? Seems impossible.

The gap shows up in multiple ways every day in the operation, but here are a couple of common examples:

First, the monthly reporting grind. Pulling numbers out of three, four, five or more systems, dropping them into a spreadsheet, cross-checking them by hand to make sure nothing contradicts itself. Submitting, then hoping your customer doesn't point out an obvious oversight. Egg on the face, assurance it won't happen again, all while knowing the current process makes that promise hard to keep. Then doing it all again next month. Staff time that should go toward running the operation instead goes toward reconciling systems that were never built to reconcile with each other, from vendors with no motivation to work together and often motivation not to.

Second, and harder to put a number on: the missed opportunity cost. The pattern nobody caught because the data lived in two (or three) different places. The maintenance issue that could've been avoided, and that also would've explained the on-time performance dip, if anyone had thought to connect those two reports side by side. The ramifications are countless, really, and you don't find out what you missed until after it already cost you something.

These providers are not running bad systems. They are simply running systems that were never, and likely never will be, designed to work as one.

That gap between individually good tools and one usable picture is exactly where we spend our time.

Sound familiar? Let's talk. Link in comments.